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Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Why Is READ MORE So Horrid?

I think it started in advertising world. Someone correct me if I'm wrong. Then people started putting it on their online cvs and stuff. It's bad in ads and it's really really bad in non-ads. Because of course in part they become ads, but that's not even the main thing.

What's it doing in an ad?

The word read talks to the fact that everyone is some kind of ersatz knowledge worker now. Y'all get to “enjoy” the world I “enjoy” as a scholar, by doing research and editing texts. Without getting paid or promoted. It's called scrolling through and updating your Facebook page.

The word more is surely about food. Do you want some more? Please sir, can I have some more?

It's your prurience and greed button being pushed, disguised as your intellectual curiosity button. Like I said, you get to “enjoy” the world I “enjoy” etc etc.

And of course what's actually being said is Go on, press me. Submit to this ad. You know you want to. You're just finding stuff out. I'm not really reading, unless read just means “perceive.” In which case why not say “see more“ or for that matter, “smell more”?
Feel more intelligent than the guy you imagine not pressing. Look, we have more information. Look, it's behind this screen--we're letting you see how this ad works and you're participating in its construction.

It's in words you see. Why the words? Why not just a >> or some symbol that stands for it? Something nonverbal like a European traffic sign? That's the other thing. It's like an American sign: Exit ONLY, Ped Xing, Yield.
Or even just continued or see over would be better. There isn't the offer of greedy guzzlings of lovely new chunks of fact further down the giant crisp packet of knowledge.

This isn't high versus low stuff. Like imagine how it would ruin porn completely.

Google has 4.6 billion entries for READ MORE.

There should be a Warhol soup can with READ MORE on it instead of Campbell's. Anyone want to do it?
Like I said on Twitter, imagine it at the bottom of every printed page. It's like, I know. I know to turn the page. Even if I don't, isn't it fun to find stuff out? And this idea that when I turn the page I'm going to get more. Rather than just another page. It's what Derrida would call the logic of the supplement. It interrupts while promising that you will be fulfilled. And so it ruins every reading experience, doesn't it? Just imagine it.

In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was READ MORE

Imagine There's No Biosphere

Being Ecological (Penguin, out now)

Beyond Sexism, Racism, Speciesism, We Are All the Same

I Wrote a Book with Björk

“A magical booklet of emails between Björk and philosopher Timothy Morton is a wild, wonderful conversation full of epiphanies and sympathies, incorporating Michael Jackson, daft goths and the vibration of subatomic particles in its dizzying leaps, alive with the thrill of falling in love with someone’s brain.” (Emily Mackay, NME)

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Timothy Morton

Timothy Morton is the author of Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), eight other books and 200 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. In 2014 Morton gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory. He is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. Email me

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“Outstanding.”—Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes

“Dark ecology has the potential to be the punk rock or experimental pop of ecological thinking.”—Kasino A4

“It isn’t [nature] itself that needs trashing — we’re doing a fine job of that already; it’s our way of thinking about it that needs to be structurally realigned ... it's an important book that, in a scant 205 pages of main text ... frames a debate that no doubt will be carried on for years to come.”—Vince Carducci, Pop Matters

“He practices what he theorizes: nothing is wasted in his argumentation.”—Emmanouil Aretoulakis, Synthesis

“Picking up where his most obvious predecessors, Gregory Bateson and Felix Guattari, left off, Morton understands mental ecology as the ground zero of ecological thinking, as that which must be redressed before anything else and above all. Morton goes beyond both his forebears, however, in repairing the rift between science and the humanities, which the Enlightenment opened up and against which Romanticism reacted. Perhaps most pleasantly surprising, given its erudition, is that in its stylistic elegance The Ecological Thought is as satisfying to read as it is necessary to ponder.”—Vince Carducci